04/15/2013

April Update

The last month has been a whirlwind in the Admissions office. We finalized Round 2 decisions, scattered to various parts of the country to host admitted student events, prepared for and hosted our on-campus admitted student weekend, reviewed Round 3 and waitlist applications and continued to interview candidates.

We've been pleased to see that both applications and yield are up so far. And based on the admits who came to campus for our admitted student weekend last week, I'm really excited about the Class of 2015. There's great diversity, energy and enthusiasm. I was particularly happy to see so many international students make the trip to Ann Arbor to meet their new classmates!

Round 3 and Waitlist Update: All but one of the Round 3 interviews have been completed. The Associate Directors are in the initial recommendation phase, after which, decisions will be reviewed by the Senior A.D., then me. We'll need to see how many deposits are received by May 1 to have a sense of the number of admission offers we can make for Round 3 and waitlisted applicants. Round 3 decisions will be released on May 15. The waitlist will continue to be reviewed throughout the summer as space becomes available in the class. If you are admitted from the waitlist, you will be asked to make a decision (on whether to enroll) pretty quickly as we want to minimize the wait time for other candidates on the waitlist. We will host an on-campus admitted student welcome day in mid-June for those admitted in May.

Fall 2014 Application: We're aiming to go live with the new app on July 1. We'll be reviewing (and revising) the essay questions in the next couple weeks. The two essays that we'll keep for sure are the first and second essays (introduce yourself in 100 words and share your career goals and why MBA). As predictable and prone-to-stock-answers as the second essay may seem, we still do want to know what you want to do and why you think an MBA makes sense. As we tell students at graduation, we won't withhold your diploma if you don't pursue the career goal that you wrote about in your essay. But we do want to know that you've given your considerable thought to your future.

If you didn't already know, Ross has started using a service to review essays for plagiarism. The software detected a number of cases of plagiarism among this year's applications. We did not and will not admit students whose applications are found to contain plagiarized content.

We do plan to roll out the team-based interview next year. We found that it provided useful insight into applicants' potential to fit in our highly collaborative and interactive community. The scale of the roll out will be determined this summer.

We're in the process of planning our recruiting travel. Our events will likely begin in August. I hope to have a schedule set by early June.